Re: Lots of Questions About Tones

John Vertical wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:53:45 -0400, ROGER MILLS wrote:
>> Alex Fink wrote:
>>> On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 23:46:09 +0100, David McCann wrote:
>>>
>>>> Imagine a language with /bas/ and /bat/. If the contrast between /p/
>>>> and /b/ is lost, /ba-/ is likely to acquire a high or rising tone in
>>>> becoming /pa-/.
>>> _High_ or rising?  AIUI voiced stops in the onset are supposed to have a
>>> lowering effect, generally I believe because of (possibly subphonemic)
>>> breathiness, so they'd yield low (or rising?) tones.
>>>
>> That's my understanding too.......... So pa- < *ba- will have low tone,
>> while pa- < *pa- will be high.
>
> I third this nagging suspicion.
Indeed; and in the other direction, I was of the impression that coda
/-t/ would be more likely to give a high or rising tone, at least if the
coda /t/ is glottalised as in English.

> I've also seen the claim that no language ever originally *develop'd* tone from
> initial consonants; that their effect is much subtler than that of codas, and so
> a split thus conditioned may only occur in a language that's tonal to begin with.
>
> Tone developing from pitch accent is also a pathway to remember. And then
> there's the fact that a tone system may change without external motivation
> ("drift"), especially once there's any sort of a countour contrast in place. BTW,
> I'm under the impression that "glide" tones are included under contour tones,
> as long as the "glideness" is phonemic. Er, tonemic.
I'm not sure I understand what "'glide' tones" are, if not contour tones.

> Personally tho, I would be much more interested in what *effects* tones may
> have. Stress can trigger all kinds of things, but tone? And I mean level /
> countour tone, not "register tone" (creaky / clear / brethy / etc). Can it
> trigger even vowel quality changes, or is it a dead-end feature that just won't
> affect anything else?
Well, level/contour tones can develop into register tones (e.g. a low
tone may become creaky voice). These register tones can then lead to
things of their own. Stress, however, is I think a poor analogy for
tones; a better one would be length. Length and tone can both indicate
stress, but they can both be phonemic features on their own.

(Also, I think you're spelling "contour" wrong. The first syllable is
the same as "conflict" (n), so with your reformed spelling I can't make
sense of "countour", and not the standard spelling I know. Perhaps,
however, I'm missing something.)

--
Tristan.